Off the clock

It is a truth universally recognized that a thick novel, filled with arcane information about whales, will put off potential readers, Nevertheless, Herman Melville’s epic novel, Moby-Dick, by no means a brisk seller at the time of its publication, has found its way to most of the informed lists of Most Magisterial American Novels.

Many last-comers, myself included, have not only found it penetrable, they have—because of its vast ensemble cast of memorable characters, the things these individuals say to one another, and the things they do—found Moby-Dick to be a rewarding, even transformative experience. Others still find the metaphor, symbolism, and validation in the epic struggle between Man and the forces of Nature, as represented by the great white whale.

Given the pressures and distractions of contemporary life, any 600-page novel is bound to seem daunting, even when it comes with a pedigree. We still approach such a work with suspicion, metaphorically kicking the tires as many of us find ourselves drawn into a world every bit as foreign—but no less fascinating or symbolic—as Moby-Dick.

The locale of which I write now is Dempsey, a fictional high-rise public housing project in northern New Jersey, close on to Jersey City and, of course, through the Holland Tunnel to New York.

As Ishmael, the protagonist of Moby-Dick tells us early in the first page, when he finds himself moody and depressed, “I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.” Ronald Dunham, a 19-year-old black man with a raging, undiagnosed stomach ulcer, recently of the Dempsey projects, and Rocco Klein, a 40-ish homicide detective who is looking desperately ahead to an early retirement, have no such ready escape valves as does Ishmael. They are both caught in the web of life, its expectations and potentials, in and about Dempsey. They are also the dual protagonists of Richard Price’s muscular, insightful 1992 novel, Clockers.

Ronald Dunham, known throughout as Strike, is a street lieutenant for a Falstaffian drug dealer named Rodney, who in his turn reports to Champ. From his own observations, Strike has calculated the working life of someone in his position is about six months before a deadly combination of violence and the colliding world of overlapping law-enforcement agencies converge on him. As Rodney is quick to point out to Strike, poor, uneducated blacks have two choices, crime or being on the street, “hustlin’. It ain’t criminal, man, it just survival. But you clean, strong young man, and if you play your cards right, someday you be working on the inside…” Rodney’s message is to save enough to buy one’s way out of the street and the hustle, which also means not using the product one sells.

Strike “had driven aimlessly through the deserted streets of downtown Dempsey for a while before deciding to make the rounds of his safes. He didn’t need to visit his money—he knew within a hundred dollars how much he had stashed across town—but he wanted to reassure himself that he had the means if not the resolve to make a new life for himself….Seven thousand here, fifteen thousand in the other two safes, equals a lot of miles and a lot of time away from all this business.”

Strike has, in effect, another role model, his older brother, Victor, who is desperately working three low-pay jobs to support himself, his girlfriend, and their infant son. Caught between these two polar extremes, Strike makes in excess of $2000 a week. Rodney is pressuring Strike to move off the streets and “indoors,” a step upward in a managerial sense. Rodney has also revealed to Strike that the one thing apparently blocking his progress is another young man whom Rodney suspects of cheating him and stealing from him.

When Rodney solicitously asks Strike if he has a gun, Strike begins to understand the “politics” of advancement. For a long time, it becomes difficult to separate his own anguish from Macbeth’s prior to concluding that he should kill King Malcolm.

When the other lieutenant Rodney suspects of double-dealing is found dead, assassination style, and Strike’s brother, Victor, confesses to the shooting, Strike’s ulcer goes on a rampage. Only vanilla Yoo-Hoo will afford him any comfort.

Homicide detective Rocco Klein becomes morally convinced Victor was not the shooter, his own role in the expanding complexion undergoing achingly similar angst to Strike.

As the complexity and anguish of moral choice grate against Strike and Klein, involving each in wrenching, humorous situations in which each shows remarkable resilience in the face of humiliation, the comparison to the characters and their plights in Moby-Dick emerge. Strike and Klein are each involved in a gritty, dark existential trap from which we learn details from their working lives as we learned details from the crew of Capt. Ahab’s ship, The Pequod. We learn, for instance, that a homicide cop should either wear a tie clip or tiepin to a crime scene, lest his tie get soiled when he bends to examine the corpse. We learn how cocaine is stepped on or diluted (and with what) in order to make it bring in more money. We learn an uneasy connection between drug dealers, their sales reps, and multi-level merchandising programs. We learn the mysteries of haircut designs, and without being made elbow-nudge aware of it, we are a privy to an authentic street language of the cop, the seller, and the user.

Readers of Clockers familiar with the past HBO series, The Wire, will recognize characters, situations, and instances, undoubtedly helping explain why Price was hired on as a staff writer for The Wire.

Clockers is not easy going because of the life styles and circumstances it unearths. It may take a bottle or two of Yoo-Hoo to provide a protective coating. The unresolved aspect of the frequent comparison of it to Moby-Dick opens the door for a range of thought. There is little doubt that the lifestyles in each novel are authentic, slices of the pie of humanity. The characters in each are memorable men and women, trying their best to eke out a meaningful and satisfying life. There are notable failures in each narrative and notable successes. There are notable examinations of ethical behavior, morality, and surprise in each.

Clockers is surely a rich, thorough investigation of social strata, of deeds and consequences, where such concepts as heroes, villains, and even role models fall away and the human condition remains.

###

Dear Instructor, Thank you for letting us see your course proposal

The Wire is a sixty-segment novel-for-television, set in contemporary Baltimore, where it follows the lives and interactions of an ensemble cast. Noted for its gritty, well-written scenes and its characters, all of whom are memorable in their edgy plausibility, it takes on social issues such as drugs, education, corruption, and the politics of survival in such professions as government, law enforcement, working conditions, and journalism. Scarcely a week elapses when you do not think about it in some way, even if it is the unfortunate one in which you wonder if many of the excellent black actors who appeared in it will ever again have such opportunities to display their talents.

You are thinking about it now because you are preparing for a meeting next week in which you are to present a list of courses you believe should be offered as a part of a curriculum for students whose goal it is to become a writer. On that list, you are asked to indicate which you wish to teach (as opposed to courses you would teach if you got stuck with the assignment). You had long ago decided you are no longer interested in teaching courses that do not interest you, thus were you to get stuck teaching a particular course, such as one of those you'd been politically maneuvered into, you would turn the course into something that would excite you to spend time with.

What a splendid course there is in viewing, discussing, examining issues and themes residing within The Wire. Because of its length, you'd either have to break the course down into two parts, The Wire I and The Wire II, that is unless you picked a handful of characters and scenes for examination, as you had already reasoned you would have to do with another course that will appear on your list. That course is one you would call The Canterbury Tales, your introduction relating the Chaucer work to the frame-tale narrative before you moved along to "The Knight's Tale," "The Miller's Tale," "The Pardoner's Tale," and "Sir Thopas' Tale," ending with the remarkable "The Wife of Bath,"demonstrating the various levels of social position, the relationship between the ranks, and the attitudes of each.

As you are working on this proposal, thoughts of The Wire never far from your mind, you happen to be reading Clockers, the imposing novel by one of the major writers on The Wire, Richard Price. As you write about The Canterbury Tales, you cannot help thinking about the parallel stories of the two majors in Clockers, Strike, a young black drug lieutenant to a drug captain, and Rocco Klein, a homicide investigator, and the way the ensemble casts of Clockers and The Wire are in so many ways counterparts of The Canterbury Tales.

Your reasoning takes you on this particular vector: It would be more a political reality for you to expect to have a course on The Canterbury Tales offered than one on The Wire. Having succeeded, you could use The Canterbury Tales to bring in The Wire for comparison, which is certainly something you'd enjoy doing. But this gives you more than a buzz; it gives you a high. Why not a third course, combining the two? The Academic Senate is a potential reason why. But the thought of it won't go away, each frame-tale explains and explores the other; each is social in the intense, pulsing presence memorable story defines . These are the kinds of connections that come from writing story; this, too, is worth talking about in the class room.

Detect and Discover

Although you had been fond of reading novels of detection and, indeed, many of your friends were writing and publishing them, you had no thought to actually write them. It was enough to think about them in a kind of hazy and noncritical admiration, aware that you did not see your own way clear to plotting such narratives in ways that could lead to a satisfactory conclusion. At one point, you'd even gone so far as to plan an elaborately complex novel, something even more prolix than Hammett's The Dain Curse, that ended with the protagonist saying in so many words,"I've fit all the pieces together and now have supporting evidence to bear out my conclusion: Phil did it." THE END.

Even when circumstances drew you closer into the net of acquiring and editing mystery novels and, in time, a mystery magazine, you still considered yourself more an adjunct. Being affectionately railroaded by Dorothy B. Hughes into serving as an officer in The Mystery Writers of America only brought you into contact with more mystery writers, more respect for their abilities at plotting which you did not believe you had, and, of necessity, more mystery writers.

Somehow the lines grew more blurred. Mystery writers were serious drinkers, and two of the more prolific at the time braced you, each in his own way, with the trope that only women mystery writers with husbands who had significant daytime jobs had the luxury of being able to plot and outline. When you recall the ways they braced you, you also recall that the process involved some quantities of bourbon. Your first mystery was done while you were still in high school and although it was bulky and filled with false clues and moments of suspense, most of it remained in pen and ink rather than finding its way into typescript. The first one you were paid for was a more intimidating experience since much of the advance was in a sense enough to pay an outstanding bill at a French restaurant on Highland Avenue, where you were known to have an affinity toward cabernets sauvignon and Gewurtztraminer. Nor did you shy away from the trockenberen auschlese and madiera desert wines nor Martel's VSOP cognac. Ah, no wonder you found yourself with a deadline and a brick wall beyond which you could not penetrate. Smaller wonder yet that you repaired to the very same French restaurant with mystery writer friends who insisted that sole with a tangy Veronique sauce would be just the thing to show you the way beyond your brick wall. Home at midnight with the strong hint of a buzz and no concrete way out of your problem, you had until nine the following morning to present the final pages.

The memory of all that. No wonder you migrated away from French restaurants and novels of detection. Is it fair to say that you have moved to Italian restaurants and novels of discovery? Yes; it is fair. You are able to salute the novel of detection from a distance, take some notion of security in your ignorance of any local French restaurants, and look at such novels of discovery as Richard Price's Lush Life and Clockers, Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves and The Painted Drum, and Richard Powers' The Echo Maker and, most recently, Generosity as role models, things to look at when the world of literary cynicism is too much with you. Instead of Martel's Very Special Old Plain Cognac, there is the occasional bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and all the hidden bottles of peppermint schnapps hidden here and there in the novels and novellas of Jim Harrison.

You could also toss in Richard Russo.

Could and did.

Good night, John Boy.

Good night, everybody.

Character Assasination

In addition to specific emails from students about directed studies or thesis advisement, or notes from the dean or department chair, I receive at least five emails a day from various divisions of the university general post office, discussing such things as possibilities for grants, informative lectures, notices of faculty appointments or promotions or publications. I am also, should the hundred miles separating my home from campus, open a program called Tommy Cam, which allows me to see an iconic statue of a Trojan warrior, seemingly fresh out of The Iliad, spoiling for a fight. These emails all carry the powerful combination of gravitas, pomposity, concern, and offerings of opportunities that will in some way or another add wisdom, useful information and/or clutter to any unused portions of my mind.

I also receive at least one and as many as ten Incident Reports, details of crimes committed on or about campus. These are all written in the distancing language of the objective police report in which victim was proceeding west on McClintok Avenue at 745 p.m. when accosted by two males approximately 20 years old, wearing gym sweats and stocking caps. These males--for they are rarely if ever females--either bear specific weapons such as knives, guns, or rebar strips, and demand property from victim. These reports are as objective as possible because of potential use as documents in trials when the marauding males "demand property" from the victim. The "property" is often revealed to be money, wallets, purses, cell phones, computers, watches.

Even though I know these crimes are real and have more than a casual effect on the psyche of the victim, the incidents seem remote, foreign, bordering on the unreal or imaginary.

Victims in fiction fare much better in that they are not rendered with such detachment or objectivity. These invented victims emerge off the page thanks to the details of their assault. It is far easier to commiserate with them than with the reallife victims wandering on and about the real university.

Conversely, there are many victims and "perps" who don't do as well because they are imprecisely and imperfectly rendered by authors who simply don't take the time to see them as individuals, rendering them in stead complete victims or evil incarnate. As a continuation of the admiration I've been expressing for Dennis Lehane, Richard Price, and George Pelecanos, I note that while each of them has some pretty unsavory sorts, they all appear as having some considerable dimension and layer or two of complexity as opposed to being a large blob of evil personified or such a hunk of unassailable virtue and integrity as to make Arthur wince even as he pulls Excalibur from out the rock.

The more the lines between good and evil are blurred the more the likelihood we will see the character as an individual, meaning less of an overt look at innocence or guilt, reliability or chaotic behavior. The overdrawn individuals, whether splendid examples of civic eclat or meanspiritedness squared or cubed, bear an unpleasing resemblance to the victims and perps on the police reports.

We want as characters individuals who bleed a bit, who have issues, problems, ambiguities, who can't remember the last line of a Steely Dan lyric or the payoff to a Wordsworth sonnet; who have onion breath or some quirk that will cause them to make a last minute rescue of defeat from the jaws of victory.

Too much bad makes a character seem like a Republican candidate or a visitation from an Aesop fable, while too much good makes them seem like Hugh Grant, sloughing his way through a movie shot on the cheap at Notting Hill. The so-called shorts or casual pieces in the beginning pages of The New Yorker go out of their way to represent individuals for the interesting individuality resident in them. At times, even they seem to belabor the handles as a convenient shorthand--but when they are right on, their subjects break into line ahead of the more ordinary sorts in our consciousness and our memory, almost as though it were being said that everyone in New York is colorful and interesting instead of rushed, cranky, and overwhelmed by noise.

Everyone who sets foot on stage has a goal, an expectation, an agenda, qualities that surround the character with an aura of attitude. The kid who delivers the pizza in your story wants a tip, sure, but knowing he's delivering the pizza to, say, Mike Nichols, he wants to impress Mike Nichols so much with his one line, Here's your pizza, Mr Nichols, that Nichols will cast him on the spot for a walk-on in his next film which will lead to the next plateau up on AFTRA scale in the next film, by which point the pizza delivery boy will have nailed down a role doing O'Neil's Hughie in summer stock, and it's a clean ride to the majors from there.

Why would Dustin Hoffman even think about doing Wily Loman when Lee J. Cobb so clearly owned it? The answer is the answer characters give in stories. Hoffman took the role because he is Hoffman, meaning he had something to give Loman that Cobb couldn't give. The reverse of this is seen in a splendid movie the first time out, Monte Walsh, rendered so well by Lee Marvin. Stunning story, slightly rewritten for the film, but still, memorable. Now comes the remake with, are you ready? Tom Sellick. How about Hugh Grant for threesies?

For the moment, we need to blur in our characters such things as good or bad or heroic or brave, layering instead the ironies of opposition, the details of squeeze and response.

Michael Chabon's detailed exegesis of Sherlock Holmes allows me to see how, at this late date, my sense of Holmes and Watson were nailed firmly into place by Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, a good enough combo for the earlier stages of my life. Today I'd want Albert Finney as Holmes and Peter O'Toole as Watson, just as, when a boy, I was thrilled beyond adventure with Errol Flynn as Robin Hood and Olivia De Haviland as Mariam, but look at the splendor available when Sean Connery reprises Robin as an aging, farting man and Audrey Hepburn shows wrinkles and vulnerability Olivia never dreamed of.

We need to look for the details that will give the proper sentiments and subtext to the words the characters say and think; if the characters do not say or think complex, conflicted things, human, realist things, we must set them going in situations where they cannot get out using a single dimension. This is what we are here for as writers and what we expect as readers.

No wonder Wolfe and I are so perfervid about our students reading and, of course, our own reading. The reading keeps us from seeing real people as flat people, from seeing flat people as real.

Them: People in Fiction

Working-class Boston.

Working-class Washington, D.C., The District.

Working-class New York.

Dennis Lehane.

George Pelecanos.

Richard Price.

To extend the calculus:

Mystic River; Gone, Baby, Gone

The Night Gardener, The Turnaround

Clockers, Lush Life

Three writers who might have never met in real life but who might well as individuals each have read the other two. Now all three meet in the context of another work, the sixty-episode Balzacian novel-for-television, The Wire, set in the working class tumult of Baltimore, a city that has some similarities to the places where each of the three writers are from. The three are brought together by yet another writer, David Simon, whose visions of the facets of Baltimore came together to form this epic novel-for-television, The Wire.

Working with Ed Burns, a former Baltimore homicide cop, Simon first put together an ensemble TV series, Homicide: Life on the Streets, based on Burns's career with the Baltimore force. In an effective way, these five men have set in motion a force or, of you prefer, a form for the kinds of novel Balzac evolved into writing, indeed the kinds of novels Lehane, Price, and Pelecanos are now evolving into writing. The definitions of fictional prototypes had, I suggest, already moved beyond the hero/heroine;villain/villainess; pivotal (you know, Iago, and some of the guys in Lonesome Dove) morphing into protagonist and antagonist, which is to say he or she who causes things to happen; cohorts or characters whose loyalties may shift, and messengers, characters who actually bring messages on stage, and exemplary characters, or men and women who serve as examples of what may or may not happen to the front-rank characters. Perhaps responsible for their choice as writers for The Wire was the growing tendency of Lehane, Pelecanos, and Price in their novels to blur the lines between the types of characters, installing in them a combination of edge, heart, and desire that gave them a standing in a story they might not have had before, certainly not in some of the genre fiction I've been reminiscing about in recent posts.

Today, seated outside a 7-11 convenience store on upper State Street, I saw a character right out of The Wire and Lush Life and Clockers and The Night Gardener. She held up a sign as so many homeless or destitute people do in such places as Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, asking for help and/or money. What reached me about her was the wording: Lost my job, my home, my dignity. That got me. The dignity part. Those two words told me more about her pain than words relating to job loss or home loss. That made her an individual who stood forth from a type. Actually, looking at her, I saw that she still had some dignity left. It wasn't all gone, although it mayn't have had much of a shelf life to count on. Price, Pelecanos, and Lehane capture such facets in their characters to the point where even the ones who are doing things on the slant side of The Social Contract emerge as individuals with a semblance of authenticity, agenda, and structure.

More and more, story is coming to mean the gritty, edgy sense of awareness it takes to make any kind of headway in the structured hallways of society. In my last work session with Brian Fagan and our editing focus to what we both hope will be a similar--The Wire- type--approach to of all things the Cro-Magnon (our Ice Age forbears), Brian let slip that their average life span was mid twenties. I jumped on that. Kids four and five, barely able to walk would have been given chores related to the Foraging life, marriage/mating probably age thirteen or fourteen. First round of kids maybe fifteen or, with luck, sixteen. Consequences: A lot of fifteen, sixteen-year-old orphans. And in our discussion of such seemingly recondite matters so far as archaeological approaches to drama were concerned, we both came to the place where we recognized the need the actor undergoes when the actor becomes another person: We have to see, feel, endure the life of those individuals on the icy streets of the past to bring them to the page not with the standard bag of tricks of the archaeologist, the artifacts and of course those cave drawings, but with the occasions of hunger and homelessness and dignity.

Speaking of The Wire, remember the character Russell "Stringer" Bell, a no-nonsense enforcer for the Barksdale family drug trade. As I recall it, Bell got A's in is economics classes at Community College, had an extensive library at home and, while not adverse to ordering up some physical violence, was seen from time to time consulting Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. There was one memorable character who--spoiler here for those who don't know the story--when he was killed, left a sense of shock and loss to the characters and the viewers.

The real story is not in the plot; it is resident in the complexity of the characters and in the surprising things they have to do, whether in the Ice Age landscape, the streets of Baltimore, or Pelecanos' off-Dupont Circle Washington D.C.

The Combination Plate, por favor

1. The book sat there for some time, seemingly too much book to read in a week and, thus, impossible for this week's review--maybe next week and Spring break.

2. The lure of the book, its title, and a reminder that a great loss was forthcoming, set connection receptors to twitching.

3. The book is Lush Life, which in the right context could be a nod to Billy Strayhorn, the incredibly gifted collaborator of Edward Kennedy Ellington, The Duke.

4. The author is Richard Price of Clockers fame. More to the point, Price is a sometimes writer on The Wire.

5. The Wire, as of tomorrow, is toast.

6. So okay, I'll have a look, then pick up a sensible, shorter book which can be read and commented on and filed by tomorrow night, which has become the default due time for the weekly review.

7. So I'm screwed because Lush Life is nothing less than magnetic, its title indeed an ironic riff on Billy Strayhorn's stunning lyric. You know:

I used to visit all the very gay places,
Those come-what-may places,
Where one relaxes
On the axis
Of the Wheel of Life,
To get the feel of life,
And jazz and cocktail.
The girls I knew had sad and sullen gray faces,
With distingue traces,
That used to be there,
You could see where
They'd been washed away
By too many through the day
Twelve o'clock-tails.
The you came along
With your siren's song
To tempt me to madness.
I thought for a while
That your poignant smile
Was tinged with the sadness
Of a great love for me.
I guess I was wrong.
Again I was wrong....

Yeah, that one. I think Strayhorn was seventeen or eighteen when he wrote it.

8. Just before we turn on the dry cycle, throw in this enhancement: In addition to Richard Price, many episodes of The Wire were written by Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos.

9. Here's the spin cycle. Just as The Wire and indeed Lush Life are bursting at the seams with an ensemble cast of characters and are related in an intricate patchwork quilt of a format, so are the works of Lehane and Pelecanos, so indeed are the novels of Denise Mina, so are many other of the novels appearing after 2000. What we are seeing is a shift in the DNA of the novel from the single point of view to the ensemble point of view, with shorter scenes, a finger-popping tempo, an edge, and a growing method of authorial observation in which it is clear that although the author may have favorites, he or she does not produce political stereotypes with whom to take opposition. All the characters believe in their individual rightness. Take a look at The History of Live by Nicole Kraus if you don't agree with this vision I present here of the novel's trip ticket Take a look at Richard Powers; The Echo Maker.

10. Individuals will continue to read and to write the "old" novel, the more linear story arc, but for those of us who cannot plot or who will not plot, this ensemble melange is a lovely switch in the depth, texture, and reach of story.

11. Many such modern novels, such as The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Urrea or The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, not only fit this ensemble description, they are wedging in another important event, which is language. Each of these two is inserting Spanish without defensiveness or self-consciousness. Some countries try to keep illegal immigrants from sneaking in across the border; America is doing its best to keep Spanish from sneaking in, but forget it, Spanish is here. Get over it. Read it